And whenever they bring the calm and logical argument to a gun fight, they get their reasonable heads blown off, and the victor whines about the unfairness of it all.

This is near the core of the "smart people" thing.

Con men, bullies, and criminals always consider themselves smarter than their victims ("marks"). The intelligentsia know damned well that what they do is useless at best, and destructive in the normal case -- but they still get rewarded with high incomes and tenure/re-election. They must, therefore, be smarter than the rubes who provide that good living.

Regards,
Ric

Like government. Conservatives often see government service, whether elected, appointed, or somewhere in the civil service bureaucracy, as a temporary job to be held until they've either done what they set out to do, or something better in the private sector comes along. Liberals, on the other hand, look at government as their highest calling. The result is that we end up with a lot of liberals in government for a lifetime and a lot of conservatives wondering why government always seems biased against them.

As a man said, government is not reason, it is not eloquence- it is force. The irony is, the liberal is someone who won't defend himself in a real gunfight, yet we are playing by his rules.

waltj-- good point. We are ever complaining about government but by being repulsed to the extent we do not involve ourselves, the system cannot help but remain as an engorged tick on society that refuses to fall off when full. And we wonder how it all came about while we were not looking-- back to the hobby idea I suppose.

because conservatives don't rely on big gov't for a pay check or hand outs the way libs do...

I'd also observe that it is the habit of conservatives to bring a calm and logical argument to an ideological gunfight.

This is changing fast among the conservative consignetti. Haven't we all read Alinsky now? A pretty bad book, but the buzzwords are already ingrained in the Tea Party frontliners. Mommy taught us all to play nice, but boot camp (Bork-Thomas-Bob Livingston etc.) toughened us and real bullets (Obama-Ayers-Wright-Van Jones etc.) have done what war had always done, move us right down Maslow's hierarchy of needs to "safety" where the niceties drop off the radar, so that hopefully we avoid going to the bottom where one must kill for a crust of bread.

because conservatives don't rely on big gov't for a pay check or hand outs the way libs do...

That's correct, we tend to seek private sector employment, either as employees or as small-business owners. But I'd argue that we can't change government to be more friendly to conservative values unless we're part of it. As it stands now, liberals have the field to themselves.

One of my older aphorisms:

"You can't play bridge with people whose objective is to kill you."

"You can't play bridge with people whose objective is to kill you."

...But you can blow their stinking bridge to pieces.
;^)